Category: Sport

Figure skating at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics wraps up this week with the women’s singles free skate competition. A winner among the best women’s skaters will be crowned on Thursday after the free skate, or long program. At the conclusion of the women’s short program, Japan’s Ami Nakai was in first place in the women’s singles competition, followed by her Japanese teammate Kaori Sakamoto, and Team USA’s Alysa Liu was in third. Also representing Team USA are Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito; the three women are known collectively as the “Blade Angels,” and they’ll all be competing in the free skate.

You can tune in to the women’s free skate on Peacock and NBC starting at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 19, and it will also re-air on USA at 1:30 a.m. ET.

Advertisement

For a complete schedule of every figure skating event at this year’s games, a rundown of who is on Team USA, and how to watch, keep scrolling. And if you want to learn even more about every event at this year’s Winter Games, here’s a guide to everything you need to know about the Milan Cortina Games.

How to watch the women’s figure skating free skate at the 2026 Winter Olympics

Date: Thursday, Feb. 19

Time: 1 p.m. ET

Location: Milano Ice Skating Arena

TV channels: NBC

Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV and more

Where to stream the women’s figure skating free skate at the 2026 Winter Olympics

The entire women’s free skate will be available to stream on Peacock. You can also tune in at 10:30 a.m. to watch the women’s free skate warm-ups.

BORMIO, Italy — The undeniably cool part of ski mountaineering’s Olympic debut here Thursday was the visual spectacle. If you’re going to add a fairly ridiculous, counterintuitive sport to the Winter Games — why would anyone trek up a hill on skis in 2026 when Robert Winterhalder gave us the ski lift in 1908? — you might as well do it in the thickest, whitest, nastiest snowstorm Northern Italy has seen all month.

“We love winter, so I’m here for it,” said 26-year-old American Anna Gibson, who was almost certainly the happiest ninth-place finisher in any event at the entire Olympics.

Advertisement

Gibson was here for it, and so were a couple thousand fans who packed the grandstand near the finish area and lined the sides of the course, many of them waving Swiss and French and even a few very wet Spanish flags. (Yes, Spain is almost a complete non-entity at the Winter Games but is oddly good at this event. There was even a Vamos! or two in the media center when Ana Alonso Rodriguez took bronze in the women’s sprint and Oriol Cardona Coll won gold in the men’s.)

As long as you didn’t care about getting soaked, and perhaps flash-frozen, watching these athletes go up the hill on skis lined with a traction-generating skin, navigate a few random obstacles and then ski back down, it seemed like a really good time. At least they got to see some action, unlike people who had tickets to postponed events like aerials or the freeski halfpipe qualifications on Thursday. What, you can’t ski off a ramp and do flips and twists 50 feet in the air because a little snow makes it too dangerous?

Ski mountaineering — skimo to the initiated — succumbs to no such wokeness.

And the athletes were truly grateful for that because for the ones who have been doing it for a long time on the World Cup circuit with no Olympic medal to shoot for, this was the ultimate validation for a lifetime of work pursuing a sport that truly makes no sense. It was a similar feeling for the athletes who took it up recently because they wanted to make an Olympics and weren’t going to be good enough to do it in other sports.

Advertisement

“I heard it was going to be in the Olympics, and I very quickly started practicing,” said Australia’s Lara Hamilton. “Always had the dream to go to the Olympics. I just failed in three different sports until I got one.”

What were the three sports?

“Nordic skiing, track 5,000 meters, surfing at one point, now skimo,” said Hamilton, who finished last in her heat by nearly 20 seconds.

By the way, this does not make Hamilton a failure. It makes her a badass. During every Olympics, an army of couch potatoes log on to social media and muse about which sport they could try that would get them here in four years if they had enough time to practice. Those people are, of course, deluding themselves. Hamilton actually made it happen.

Advertisement

And there is something kind of neat about the idea there are people who pretty much stumbled into skimo and wound up at the freaking Olympics.

Take the two Americans who competed Thursday.

Gibson was a lifelong skier growing up in Wyoming but spent much of her athletic career as a track athlete and distance runner and even competed in some NCAA track championships for University of Washington. She started doing skimo last year. Her first real race last December was the one that got her into the Olympics by teaming up with her friend, Cameron Smith, to secure the North American slot.

And how did Smith find skimo? He got turned onto it a dozen years earlier when his sister convinced him to try The Grand Traverse, a two-person backcountry ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen, Colorado.

Advertisement

“I had no idea what it was or what she was talking about,” said Smith, who looks exactly like the kind of person you’d want to meet if you needed help on a backcountry trail in the Rocky Mountains, with his untrimmed red beard and flowing red hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I got hooked on the mode of travel.”

That opened up a whole new world, where he started winning national championships, competing on the World Cup circuit and even snagging his first podium in 2022.

Now here they were, two very unlikely American Olympians, hoping more people would get turned on to their hobby just like they did before it was a big deal on the biggest stage in sports.

Advertisement

“It was super fun to be part of this historic moment and help introduce our sport to the world,” said Smith, who is better in the distance events than in the Olympic sprint, which lasts less than three minutes. “You can feel the excitement everyone has to see skimo. So many people worked so hard to make this happen. Everything we do from here is just icing on the cake.”

Smith and Gibson didn’t come close to making the finals stage, much less medaling, but they did advance into the semis as so-called “lucky losers,” meaning they didn’t finish in the top three of their heats but qualified for the next round because they were among the three fastest also-rans.

“Luckiest losers of all time right here!” Gibson said in an Instagram story they posted together after the heats.

Unfortunately for the plucky Americans, that was the end of the road. Once the best started racing against the best, it became clear that there are small group of people in the world who are way better at this than everyone else, and they pretty much all come from Switzerland, France and Spain.

Advertisement

“I think you can feel that skimo is just part of the culture here,” said Gibson, who paired with Smith will be contenders in Saturday’s longer mixed relay. “It’s very normal. It’s very understood here, and to not have to explain what it is to people here and to know there are fans who have been supporters of this sport for a long time, it’s really special.”

Not to mix a metaphor here, but this is the question now: Is skimo on its way up or down as an Olympic sport after its big debut?

On the plus side, it is somewhat entertaining. The races hold your attention because they last fewer than three minutes and there are no judging controversies.

Advertisement

On the minus side, do we really need to be adding Olympic sports just to give the Swiss more shots at medals? Also, do we really want to be glorifying a sport where a key part of the contest is how fast you can unlock your skis from your boots to walk up stairs and then put them back on?

On a related note, I found myself wondering why the athletes have to find a place to put the “skins” from their skis — usually in a knapsack — before going back downhill. It seems like after all that work, you should just be able to leave it on the ground and have someone come pick it up. Total waste of time. I did, however, appreciate the ingenuity of one guy who just stuffed it down the front of his pants, which truly seemed like a win-win for him. Maybe he was headed to ski jump after this.

And finally, if this were a real mountain sport and not a total gimmick, wouldn’t Norway be good at it?

Advertisement

In all seriousness, it was neat to watch a sport so obscure that the biggest question for every athlete is how they found it in the first place. And all those stories are fun and different, and you could sense how much it meant to them to share that with a worldwide audience.

“Finally we get to play in the major leagues,” said Cardona, the newly minted gold medalist.

Time will tell if skimo sticks around the Olympics. But 118 years after the invention of the ski lift, which should have made this sport obsolete, it finally had its moment. Better late than never.

Viewership for the 2026 Daytona 500 rebounded from 2025, but was still lower than previous regularly scheduled races in recent years.

Fox Sports said Thursday that nearly 7.5 million people watched Tyler Reddick’s win on Sunday. That’s an increase from the 6.76 million people that watched the 2025 Daytona 500, but that race was delayed significantly by rain. Last year’s event completed just eight green-flag laps before a rain delay of over three hours stopped the race.

Advertisement

Sunday’s race was moved up an hour because of potential rain, and started just after 2 p.m. ET instead of after 3 p.m. ET.

With the 2024 Daytona 500 pushed to Monday because of rain, the last regularly scheduled race came in 2023. That race, won by Ricky Stenhouse Jr., averaged 8.17 million viewers. In 2022, the Daytona 500 drew over 8.8 million viewers.

Daytona 500 viewership has been on a steady decline since 2006, when Jimmie Johnson’s win drew over 19.3 million viewers. Kurt Busch’s win in 2017 had an average audience of 11.9 million and no Daytona 500 since then has gotten close to breaking 10 million.

In 2018, Austin Dillon’s win had 9.3 million viewers and Denny Hamlin’s win a year later had 9.2 million.

Advertisement

Did moving up Sunday’s race mean fewer viewers ended up watching? That’s an unknown. It’s possible, but the earlier 500 also meant it didn’t run head-to-head with the NBA All-Star Game as much as it was scheduled to originally. The All-Star Game drew its highest audience since 2011 on Sunday with 8.8 million viewers.

The game, aired on NBC after the network’s daytime Olympic coverage, drew 4.1 more million viewers than the 2025 All-Star Game on TNT.

Charlie Baker is still very much on board with the NCAA tournament expanding in the near future.

The NCAA president reiterated his support for a plan to expand the annual basketball tournament in the near future, something he’s long been in favor of. What that looks like, or when it happens, remains to be seen.

“We’re still talking to the various players in this one,” he said on Thursday, via ESPN. “I said all along that I think there are some very good reasons to expand the tournament.

“So, I would like to see it expand.”

The NCAA tournament men’s field currently sits at 68 teams, with the last expansion coming back in 2011. That brought in the “First Four” round, which cuts the field from 68 to 64 for the first round. The women’s NCAA tournament officially expanded to 68 teams in 2021, too. That marked the most notable expansion in the tournament since it doubled in size from 32 in 1985.

Advertisement

But expanding the tournament further is an idea that has been thrown around in recent years. The NCAA basketball selection committees met last summer and learned that expansion, if approved, would likely start during the 2026-27 campaign. That would likely expand the field to either 72 or 76 teams. It’s unclear if the women’s tournament would expand at the same time.

Baker insisted Thursday that he wasn’t worried about how the NCAA would fund the expanded tournament. The biggest challenge has long been simply a logistical one with the basketball calendar. Several major men’s conference tournaments run right up to the selection show — the Big Ten championship game ends moments before that show starts and teams are announced — and the NCAA tournament ends the week that the Masters starts. That doesn’t leave much time for added games.

Advertisement

There were several notable teams that were just barely left out of the tournament last season, including both Indiana and West Virginia. An expanded field almost certainly would have meant they would have been included.

“From my point of view, the more teams we can get into the tournament and make it work logistically and mathematically, the better,” Baker said. “It gives more kids the opportunity to experience that.”

But of course, expanding the field wouldn’t eliminate the snub conversation. It would just push it back by four, or eight, spots.

Regardless, the NCAA seems set on expanding the tournament in the future. Whether that happens in 2027, or a few years down the road, remains to be seen.

Today on the Kevin O’Connor show, KOC is joined by Tom Haberstroh to ask some big questions in the NBA world: Are the Houston Rockets done? What teams have the most to prove in the 2nd half of the season? Which young players might break out and which coaches are on the hot seat?

Advertisement

Then, the pair look at two of the hottest names in college basketball: Darius Acuff and Darryn Peterson. How does Acuff’s 49-point explosion affect his draft stock? Is Peterson’s self-check-out gambit for Kansas threatening his no. 1 draft pick potential?

Later, KOC is joined by Daman Rangoola, Sam Esfandiari & Claire De Lune from All-Star Weekend to talk the latest with the Lakers and Warriors. That and more on today’s show!

(1:11) Contenders with the most to prove
(13:38) Young players to watch
(20:26) NBA coaches on the hot seat
(33:46) Kings decimated by injuries
(37:12) Darius Acuff drops 49 points vs. Alabama
(41:44) What’s going on with Darryn Peterson?
(56:32) Daman Rangoola & Sam Esfandiari join from All-Star
(1:43:10) Claire De Lune joins from All-Star

🖥️ Watch this full episode on the Yahoo Sports NBA YouTube channel

Check out all episodes of The Kevin O’Connor Show and the rest of the Yahoo Sports podcast family at https://apple.co/3zEuTQj or at yahoosports.tv

Australian sports presenter Danika Mason apologized Thursday after drinking alcohol before Channel Nine’s Today Show live Winter Olympics broadcast. Mason slurred her words throughout the segment and went off-topic, discussing iguanas when the segment had been focused on coffee. Studio host Karl Stefanovic attempted to cover for Mason, saying that cold weather can affect speech.

“I want to take full responsibility, it’s not the standard I set myself,” Mason said Thursday. “So in saying that, I’m genuinely really sorry and I’m thanking everyone for those messages I’ve received as well.”

Advertisement

Mason added that she shouldn’t have had a drink on an empty stomach and that the cold weather did not help.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, however, expressed his clear support for Mason.

“I’m pro-Danika. Good on her,” Albanese said. “She’s over in Italy … and she would have been tired. It’s the time difference. It would have been having an impact. Nothing to see here.”

Two days after former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban argued on X the NBA should actually embrace tanking, current Phoenix Suns and Mercury owner Mat Ishbia used social media Thursday to call out intentional losing and voice his confidence in league commissioner Adam Silver.

“This is ridiculous! Tanking is losing behavior done by losers,” Ishbia wrote on X. “Purposely losing is something nobody should want to be associated with. Embarrassing for the league and for the organizations. And the talk about this as a ‘strategy’ is ridiculous.

“If you are a bad team, you get a good pick. That makes sense. But purposely shutting down players and purposely losing games is a disgrace and impacts the integrity of [the] whole league.

“This is much worse than any prop bet scandal. This is throwing games strategically. Horrible for fans that pay to watch and cheer on their team. And horrible for all the real teams that are competing for playoff spots.

“Awful behavior that Adam Silver and the NBA will need to stop with massive changes, and I have complete confidence that with his leadership, he will fix it. Those of us in a position of influence need to speak out… the only ‘strategy’ is doing right by fans, players and the NBA community.”

This past Saturday during All-Star Weekend, Silver conceded the league’s observed worse tanking behavior this season than it’s seen in recent memory.

Advertisement

He also made it clear that he’s considering “every possible remedy” to stop the behavior. Silver’s open to changing the draft structure, and he didn’t rule out taking away picks from tanking teams.

Last week, the NBA fined both the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers six figures for “overt” tanking and, more specifically, for their nefarious roster management in recent games.

The NBA currently has seven teams with fewer than 20 wins. The Jazz and Pacers are among that bottom-dwelling group that’s looking toward the future, including this year’s draft, which most notably features four potential franchise needle-movers: Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, Duke’s Cameron Boozer and UNC’s Caleb Wilson.

Advertisement

The Suns, however, are in playoff contention. Ishbia’s passionate words came in a quote post of a Yahoo Sports story from Tom Haberstroh, who power-ranked tanking teams based on a five-factor system.

Despite hitting the reset button — moving away from Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal — Phoenix isn’t tanking or even in rebuild mode. It’s in seventh place in a crowded Western Conference table.

At 32-23, the Suns have maximized a roster full of players who have chips on their shoulders.

Their performance and the organization’s refreshing transition after carrying the highest payroll in league history last season give Ishbia’s comments Thursday more credibility.

Nate Tice & Charles McDonald join forces to answer the NFL offseason’s biggest looming questions submitted by the audience. The duo start off by diving into the New York Giants’ potential NFL Draft plans with the 5th overall pick, how the Chicago Bears can fix their defensive line and whether or not Brian Daboll is a good fit with QB Cam Ward as the new Tennessee Titans OC.

Advertisement

Next, Nate & Charles discuss whether or not the Los Angeles Chargers can fix their offensive line in one offseason, if the Jacksonville Jaguars defense can take a leap next season, who the Denver Broncos should be targeting in free agency (Tyler Allgeier?) and what our expectations for the 2026 Washington Commanders should look like.

Later, the two hosts wrap up with thoughts on the New England Patriots’ upcoming offseason decisions, why Sean McVay changed to a duo run game style with the Los Angeles Rams, whether Sean McDermott was really the problem with the Buffalo Bills and more.

(2:40) – Biggest offseason questions: Giants draft plans, Bears DL, Daboll & Cam Ward

(24:30) – Biggest offseason questions: Chargers OL, Jaguars defense, Broncos, Commanders

Advertisement

(44:15) – Biggest offseason questions: Patriots, Rams, Bills & more

🖥️ Watch this full episode on YouTube

Check out all episodes of Football 301 with Nate Tice and the rest of the Yahoo Sports podcast family at https://apple.co/3zEuTQj or at yahoosports.tv

Subscribe to Yahoo Fantasy Forecast

There were so many coaching changes this past month we decided to split our annual coaches show in two parts. Nate Tice joins Matt Harmon to breakdown every single head coach and offensive coordinator change in the NFC. Harmon and Tice identify which changes they like, they’re fine with and the one’s they are most skeptical of for fantasy purposes in 2026.

Advertisement

(3:00) – NFC coaching changes this offseason: I like it, It’s fine and I’m skeptical

(6:18) –  I like it – Cardinals HC Mike LaFleur

(20:45) – I like it – Commanders OC David Blough

(30:00) – I like – Falcons HC Kevin Stefanski + OC Tommy Rees

(38:30) – It’s fine – Lions OC Drew Petzing

(47:30) – It’s fine – Buccaneers OC Zac Robinson

(56:00) – It’s fine – Seahawks OC Brian Fleury

(1:02:00) – I’m skeptical – Eagles OC Sean Mannion

(1:11:30) – I’m skeptical – Giants HC John Harbaugh + OC Matt Nagy

🖥️ Watch this full episode on YouTube

Check out all episodes of the Yahoo Fantasy Forecast and the rest of the Yahoo Sports podcast family at https://apple.co/3zEuTQj or at yahoosports.tv

The NCAA has issued a threat to schools among the recent rise of court cases arguing for additional eligibility. The threat is to impose the Rule of Restitution. This was created in 1975 to allow the NCAA to punish a school or athlete if the preliminary injunction, which that athlete competed under, was overturned. Andy Staples, Ross Dellenger and Steven Godfrey discuss the NCAA issuing this threat and what may be the fallout. They also dive into the discussion that the SEC had about the conferences self-governing rather than the NCAA being the governing body. Is the NCAA’s power dwindling enough for it to not be necessary anymore?

Advertisement

Then, after the recent discussion about former Nebraska AD, Bill Moos, saying he wanted to move Nebraska back to the Big 12, Andy got to thinking about who were the winners and losers from all of the realignment in the 2010s. This led to him ranking what teams made the best move during that era of realignment. The crew discusses the list and what were some of the issues and casualties that came with it.

Later, the guys revisit a conversation from the beginning of the show. When discussing court cases, Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar and his case was discussed. This led to the point that many Tennessee fans want one of the two five-star quarterbacks on the roster to be the Vols’ QB this year instead. The guys discuss how Tennessee should go about deciding this and what the future of player development looks like. Is there a way that a “minor league” could be created out of schools in the Group of Six?

All of this and more on today’s College Football Enquirer.

Advertisement

0:00:00 – NCAA threatens the Rule of Restitution

14:44 – Is the NCAA needed in college sports anymore?

31:38 – Ranking conference realignment of the 2010s

52:51 – Should Tennessee move on from Joey Aguilar?

58:47 – Creating a “minor leagues” in college football

🖥️ Watch this full episode on YouTube

Check out all episodes of the College Football Enquirer and the rest of the Yahoo Sports podcast family at https://apple.co/3zEuTQj or at yahoosports.tv